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Functional Categories in the Lexicon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

John S. Lumsden
John S. Lumsden*
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal
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Extract

Stowell (1981) demonstrates that nominal phrases in VP or PP are subject to certain constraints which are not pertinent in the domain of NP or AP. Nominal phrases in VP or PP are obligatory and they must be realized in a position which is adjacent to the head of the phrase (i.e., in a phrase marker; “V° NP” or “P° NP”). In contrast, nominal phrases in NP or AP are optional and do not have to be adjacent to the head. There is a systematic exception to this generalization in the lexically determined class of nouns known as Bare NP adverbs (cf. Larson 1985). Nominal phrases headed by one of this class of nouns appear optionally in VP and they are not required to be adjacent to the verb.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 37 , Issue 2: Numéro Spécial Functional Categories , June 1992 , pp. 219 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1992

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References

1 This paper was written as part of the Project on the Genesis of Haitian creole. The project is financed by the Conseil de Recherche en Sciences Humaines du Canada, the Fonds d’Aide aux Chercheurs et à la Recherche (Québec government) and by the Fonds Institutionel de Recherche (Université du Québec à Montréal). The analysis is a continuation of work in Lumsden (1987). I thank the many people who have given me comments on earlier versions.

2 Two other cases are: a syntactic head which corresponds to more than one lexical entry (e.g., derivational affixes and their stems), and a lexical entry which has no corresponding head (e.g., “cranberry” morphemes).

3 The examples (2a) and (2d) are taken from Stowell (1981). Although not every speaker finds such examples to be perfect, they are generally judged to be much better than adjacency violations in VP or PP, as in (1).

4 One systematic exception to the obligatory nature of nominal phrases in VP is the optional direct objects of verbs of motion (e.g., He climbed (the mountain) all day). I assume that there is a specific rule of epenthesis in these contexts (along the lines of the rule proposed to apply in NP and AP in Section 4.3.)

5 The KP may only indirectly dominate the NP due to intervening functional categories (e.g., determiners). Later in the text, I will argue that functional category matrices may be inserted into syntactic representations after D-structure. I suppose that this insertion process is the source of the intervening projections.

6 These examples are presented as embedded clauses to abstract away from the verb second phenomenon which presumably involves head movement from INFL to the head of CP.

7 I am aware that many variations of this surface word order are possible. I suppose that the theory here is no different from others in that these variations must follow from other factors.

8 In Lumsden (1987), I suggest that there is a subclass of adjectives (adjectives which are only in predicate positions) which have complex lexical entries. The following historical progression gives some support to this notion:

  1. a.

    a. OE (Ælfric):

  2. He:o wearō on slærpe

  3. ‘He fell asleep.’

  4. b.

    b. ME (c. 1135, the Peterborough Chronicle):

  5. he lai an slep in scip

  6. ‘He lay asleep in the ship.’

  7. c.

    c. ME (c.1250 Layamon, 1159):

  8. Heo weren a-slepe

  9. ‘He was asleep.’

  10. d.

    d. Pres.-day English:

  11. He was asleep.

9 This is essentially the empty preposition structure of Bresnan and Grimshaw (1978) transposed to a theory of KP. The distinction is that here the empty category is generated from the lexical entry of the Bare-NP adverb.

10 Mohand Guersel (personal communication) points out that in at least some languages, there may be a class of noun lexical entries which is parallel to the complex lexical entries of verbs and prepositions, namely, kinship terms. In Berber, these nouns seem to be constrained to appear with an obligatory complement; e.g., brother of X, etc.